{"id":3792084,"url":"https://alion.io/job/gole-chief-technology-officer-cto","title":"Chief Technology Officer (CTO)","company":{"id":4496088,"name":"Gole","domain":null,"url":"https://alion.io/company/gole-2","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Roodepoort, South Africa"],"countries":["ZA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"BGP","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"FinOps","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"ITIL","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"OpenStack","optional":false},{"name":"PCI DSS","optional":false},{"name":"Proxmox VE","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"VMWare","optional":false},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T04:50:59Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T04:50:59Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Introduction\n\nGole Cloud provides IaaS / PaaS / managed private and hybrid cloud / backup and disaster recovery / colocation services to enterprise, public sector, and financial services clients across South Africa and the SADC region. Clients choose a local provider for data sovereignty, POPIA compliance, low latency, and responsive support, while competing offerings from global hyperscalers now operate in-country regions.\n\nThe CTO will position Gole Cloud's platform to win on those strengths: sovereign, resilient, and cost-competitive cloud, with credible hybrid and multi-cloud integration with the hyperscalers. The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical credibility, and carries executive accountability for uptime, security, and technology spend.\n\nDuties & Responsibilities\nTechnology strategy and roadmap\n\n Define and execute a 3–5 year technology strategy aligned to the Gole Cloud's growth and profitability targets.\n\n Own the product and platform roadmap with the CPO/Commercial team: compute, storage, networking, backup/DR, containers and Kubernetes, AI/GPU infrastructure, and managed services.\n\n Shape the hybrid and multi-cloud proposition, including interconnects and partnerships with hyperscalers operating in South Africa.\n\n Evaluate build, buy, and partner decisions; manage strategic vendor relationships VMware/Broadcom alternatives, H3C, Sangfor, OpenStack, hardware OEMs, network carriers).\n\nPlatform, infrastructure, and operations\n\n Ensure availability, performance, and scalability of the cloud platform against contracted SLAs.\n\n Oversee data centre, colocation, and network footprint, including capacity planning and expansion.\n\n Drive automation, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and SRE practices to lower cost-to-serve.\n\n Own incident, problem, and major-outage management, including executive communication to clients.\n\nSecurity, risk, and compliance\n\n Own the information security program and cyber resilience directly.\n\n Ensure compliance with POPIA, the Cybercrimes Act, ECTA, and, where relevant, ICASA licensing obligations.\n\n Support clients in regulated sectors, including financial services requirements for outsourcing and cloud (Prudential Authority / FSCA standards), and public sector requirements under the National Data and Cloud Policy.\n\n Maintain certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, ISO 22301 and PCI DSS where applicable.\n\n Own business continuity and disaster recovery for internal and client-facing services.\n\nPeople and organization\n\n Lead, grow, and retain a high-performing engineering organization in a competitive local skills market.\n\n Build succession plans, graduate and learnership pipelines, and skills development aligned to B-BBEE and Employment Equity targets.\n\n Foster a culture of ownership, engineering excellence, and customer focus.\n\nCommercial and executive leadership\n\n Manage the technology budget (OPEX and CAPEX) and improve unit economics and gross margin per service.\n\n Act as senior technical voice with key clients, partners, and investors; support large bids and tenders.\n\n Report to the CEO on technology performance, risk, and investment.\n\nDesired Experience & Qualification\nQualifications\n\n Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (NQF 7). Honours or Master's preferred.\n\n MBA or equivalent business qualification advantageous.\n\n Relevant certifications advantageous: cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP), TOGAF, CISSP/CISM, ITIL.\n\nExperience\n\n 15+ years in technology, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership role (Head of Technology, VP, or CTO).\n\n Proven experience running cloud, hosting, data centre, or telecoms infrastructure at scale with contractual SLAs.\n\n Track record of leading teams of 50+ engineers, including through multiple management layers.\n\n Experience managing multi-million-rand budgets and delivering measurable margin or cost improvements.\n\n Experience selling to and supporting enterprise, financial services, or public sector clients in South Africa.\n\nTechnical knowledge\n\n Virtualization and private cloud platforms (H3C, Sangfor, VMware, OpenStack, Nutanix, Proxmox or similar) and migration strategies.\n\n Containers and orchestration (Kubernetes), DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible).\n\n Storage (block, object, file), backup and DR technologies, and networking (SDN, BGP, peering, interconnects).\n\n Hyperscaler services and hybrid/multi-cloud architectures.\n\n Security architecture, zero trust, identity, and SOC operations.\n\n Emerging areas: GPU/AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud, FinOps.\n\nSouth African context\n\n Working knowledge of POPIA, the Cybercrimes Act, ECTA, and data sovereignty requirements.\n\n Understanding of sector regulation affecting clients (Prudential Authority, FSCA, SITA and public sector procurement).\n\n Familiarity with B-BBEE, Employment Equity, and local skills development frameworks.\n\n Experience managing operations through load-shedding and grid instability.\n\nLeadership competencies and attributes\n\n Strategic thinking: connects technology choices to market position, pricing, and margin.\n\n Technical credibility: respected by engineers; can challenge architecture and vendor claims in depth.\n\n Operational discipline: calm, decisive leadership during outages and security incidents.\n\n Commercial acumen: understands cost-to-serve, capacity economics, and contract risk.\n\n People leadership: builds diverse teams, develops talent, and retains scarce skills.\n\n Stakeholder influence: communicates clearly with the CEO, Board, clients, regulators, and partners.\n\n Integrity and accountability: owns outcomes and upholds governance in line with King IV principles.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5733,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Government","IT Infrastructure & Networking Services","IT Consulting & Digital Transformation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-05T06:57:55Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["seen:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-05T12:55:49Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/gole-chief-technology-officer-cto","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/gole-chief-technology-officer-cto.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T12:55:49Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":16700,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4496088},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4496088"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fgole-chief-technology-officer-cto"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fgole-chief-technology-officer-cto"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fgole-chief-technology-officer-cto"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/gole-chief-technology-officer-cto\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fgole-chief-technology-officer-cto"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3792084}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":4496088,"detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3792084},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); 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